Alexandre Dumas - The Last Cavalier - Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon

With what looked like a gesture of despair, the count joined the Chevalier outside the drawing room. Few people noticed the discreet exit, and those who did were unaware of its unfortunate significance.

After the contract had been read, Bonaparte, always in a hurry to finish what was under way, as eager to leave the Tuileries when he was there as he was to return when he was out, picked up the pen that was lying on the table. Without wondering whether he should be the first to sign, he hastily placed his signature on the contract, and then, just as four years later he would take the crown from the pope’s hands and place it himself on Josephine’s head, he handed his wife the pen.

Josephine signed, then passed the pen to Mademoiselle de Sourdis, who instinctively looked around worriedly, but in vain, for the Comte de Sainte-Hermine. Filled with anxiety, she signed her name and tried to hide her concern. But it was the Comte’s turn next to sign.

A murmur disturbed the drawing room as heads turned in search of the bridegroom. Soon there was no choice but to call out for him. Only there was no answer.

For a long moment, in surprised silence, the guests looked at each other, all of them, wondering what could have happened to the count at the very moment his presence was indispensable and his absence a complete lapse of etiquette.

Finally someone mentioned that during the reading of the contract, a young well-dressed stranger had appeared in the dorway to the drawing room and had exchanged a few whispered words with the count before leading him off, more like his executioner than his friend.

Still, the count might not have left the house. Madame de Sourdis rang for a servant and ordered him to organize a search for the absent bridegroom. For several minutes, amidst the buzz of six hundred stunned wedding guess, servants could be heard calling out to each other from one floor to the next.

Then one of the servants thought to ask the coachmen out in the courtyard if they had seen two young men. Several of them had, as it happened. They’d noticed that one of the young men had been hatless in spite of the rain. They reported that the two men had rushed down the steps and leaped into a carriage, shouting, “To the stagecoach house!” and the carriage had galloped off. One of the coachmen was certain he had recognized the young man without a hat: It was the Comte de Sainte-Hermine.

The guests looked at each other in stupefaction. Then, out of the silence, they heard a voice shout: “The carriage and escort for the First Consul!” They all respectfully allowed Monsieur and Madame Bonaparte, along with Madame Louis Bonaparte, to pass. And as soon as they had left, pandemonium struck.

Everyone rushed from the elegant rooms of Madame de Sourdis’s grand house as if there were a fire.

Neither Madame de Sourdis nor Claire, however, had any inclination to stop them. Fifteen minutes later they found themselves alone.

Madame de Sourdis, with a painful cry, rushed to her daughter’s side. Claire was trembling, about to faint. “Oh, Mother, Mother!” she cried, bursting into sobs as she collapsed into the countess’s arms, “it is just what the prophetess predicted! My widowhood has begun.”

WE SHOULD EXPLAIN why Mademoiselle de Sourdis’s fiancé disappeared so incomprehensibly just as the marriage contract was to be signed. For the guests, his disappearance was the cause for surprise; for the countess, it prompted all sorts of speculations, each new one more improbable than the last. For her daughter, it elicited incessant tears.

We have seen that Fouché summoned the Chevalier de Mahalin to his office the day before news of his dismissal was to be publicly announced. Hoping to get back his ministry, Fouché then planned with Mahalin the organization of burning brigades in the West.

The bands of incendiaries had soon begun to appear, and already they had left their mark. Scarcely two weeks after the Chevalier had left Paris, it was learned that two landowners had been burned, one in Buré and the other in Saulnaye. Again, terror was spreading throughout the Morbihan.

For five years civil war had raged in that unfortunate region, but even in the midst of its most horrible outrages against humanity, never had such banditry as this been practiced. To find robbery and torture of the kind that accompanied these burnings, one had to go back to the worst days of Louis XV and to the horrors of religious discrimination under Louis XIV.

Terror came in bands of ten, fifteen, or twenty men who seemed to rise out of the earth and move like shadows over the land, following ravines, leaping across stiles; and any peasants who had ventured out late in the night had to hide behind trees or throw themselves facedown behind hedges, or else fall prey to the brigands. Then, suddenly, through a half-open window or a poorly closed door, they would burst into some farmhouse or chateau and, taking the servants by surprise, bind them up. Next, they would light a fire in the middle of the kitchen; they’d drag the master or mistress of the house over to it and lay their victim down on the floor with his feet to the flames until pain forced him to reveal where his money was hidden. Sometimes they would then free their prisoner. Other times, once they’d got the money, if they feared they might be identified, they would stab, hang, or bludgeon to death the unfortunate they had robbed.

After the third or fourth episode of that kind, after the authorities had indeed confirmed the fires and murders, the rumor began to spread, at first secretly, then quite openly, that Cadoudal himself strode at the head of those gangs. The brigands and their leader always wore masks, but some who had seen the largest of the bands stalk through the night were sure they had recognized the leader as George Cadoudal—by his size, by his bearing, and especially by his large round head.

This was difficult to believe. How could George Cadoudal, who acted so honorably in all things, have suddenly become the contemptible chief of a shameless, pitiless burning brigade?

Yet the rumor kept growing. More and more people claimed they had recognized George, and soon Le Journal de Paris officially announced that Cadoudal, in spite of his promise not to be the first to open hostilities—Cadoudal who had disbanded his Royalist forces—had now scraped together fifty or so bandits with whom he was terrorizing the countryside.

In London, Cadoudal himself might not have happened upon the article in Le Journal de Paris , but a friend showed it to him. He took the official announcement as an accusation against him, and he saw the accusation as a flagrant attack on his honor and loyalty.

“Very well,” he said, “by attacking me the French authorities have broken the pact we swore between us. They were unable to kill me with gun and sword, so now they are trying to kill me with calumny. They want war, and war they shall have.”

That very evening George embarked on a fishing boat. Five days later it landed him on the French coast, between Port-Louis and the Quiberon peninsula.

At the same time, two other men, Saint-Régeant and Limoëlan, were also leaving London to go to Paris. As they would be traveling through Normandy, they’d enter the country by the cliffs near Biville. They had spent one hour with George the day they left, to receive their instructions. Limoëlan had considerable experience in the intrigues of civil war, and Saint-Régeant was a former naval officer, skilled and resourceful, a sea pirate who had become a land pirate.